


A ragged fringe is the floating-heart

by Toothless



Category: The Grandmaster - Fandom
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Female-Centric, Gen, Gong Er-centric, POV Female Character, References to Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-04
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2018-01-03 10:02:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toothless/pseuds/Toothless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gong Er has a heart that swells with feeling and hands that smell of blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A ragged fringe is the floating-heart

Gong Er meets Ma San for the first time when she is eight and he is eleven. He calls her father _sifu_ and her hatred of him burns like a dark thing.

She has him flat on his back in eight moves.

 

The tea is Ceylon-sweet, a tang of oranges at the back of her throat, delicate and exotic.

Indulgence, she knows. A bribe, she thinks. Outside, winter is slowly dressing the courtyard in a white, downy coat.

Her father moves like water, like an undulating curve, pressing barely-there footprints in the snow. Gong Er has her face up against the cool window, the chill from the glass numbing her nose, fanning her rounded baby cheeks. Behind her on a lacquered table, Mooncakes on delicate blue-and-white china is carelessly forgotten, her cup of tea cooling, abandoned for better things.

She thinks she could do what her father does, dance in the cold with curled hands, claws in the wind. Gong Er is right.

 

When she is sixteen her father forbids her from training. She is undefeated.

Gong Er feels like she has a stone in her chest and black poison beneath her skin, staining her heart, her hands. Ma San watches from a distance, his eyes dark and glittering in the shadow of the carved-stone pillar. Gong Er imagines his neck broken, white bone stretching the fish-belly paleness of his throat, an eight-pointed pavilion beneath his chin. She imagines soft flesh splitting, unraveled like the seam of her silk dresses, peeled like the skin of a peach.

Two, three, nine moves. She can kill him in seven, she knows.

 

When Gong Er told Ip Man that she wishes she had been in the opera her heart was set for Mou Daan, Gong Er knows.

Song is only the other coin of dance, after all.

 

She loves him silently, achingly. The arch of a bird’s wings, the brush of black ink against pale paper. Their love is unspoken, as intangible as mist.

She wants him. Skin and heat, hands on her shoulders, fingers spread across her breasts. His body beneath, inside her, next to her. Laid out like a fallen enemy in her bed, wrapped in her sheets.

Desire is a foreign guest in her body, one she hasn’t met before. Ip Man lights unknown lanterns in the dark.

 

Gong Er dreams of death as she learns how to heal a broken bone, mend split skin, a deep cough. For every man she lays hands on to cure, she imagines a thousand ways to kill him.

Gong Er never stops dancing, never fully uncurls her claws. She has light enough footprints now to never leave a mark.

 

Dancing with Ma San is a great pleasure. The metal sings and sparks around them, snow falling like a curtain across a stage. Finally, Gong Er rejoices, finally they shall dance. They are like brother and sister here, at last, born of the selfsame root.

Moving across white floors of cold, she remembers Ma San at eleven, twelve, thirteen, and the envy, like a jade necklace around her throat, weighing her down. She imagined her body a meat coat at times, the flesh a robe of inconvenience. The envy, she reflects, had felt almost liberating, paling in comparison to her hatred. She doesn't envy now. Gong Er has shed the last pearl of a heavy necklace, slipped into her right skin at last.

Ma San dies in ninety-two moves.

Gong Er is not a man; she is her father’s best student. She is undefeated.

 

Death comes in a gasp of breath and Gong Er is not surprised. It is only shameful, she thinks, fingers tracing the rim of her cup, causing ripples across the see-through surface of cheap, grey tea. It’s only shameful, that her house will end in a soft chair with sticky, sweet opium in her lungs.

Gong Er thinks of Ip Man then, of a gossamer heat between her legs, the light of an unknown lantern in the dark. She thinks of their dance, like weightlessness, like puffs of smoke in a shaded room. Gong Er remembers the sound of black wood splinting, of victory like air, essential.

She flexes her fingers, nails yellowed by poppy seeds, the hard skin of her hands spotted with flecks of brown.

Her hands do not uncurl.


End file.
